• We “know” that happiness tends to hit a nadir around the age of 50 – but do unhappiness and related conditions such as stress and loneliness and pain reach a peak at about that time, too?
• This article looks at tons of data (total "N" almost 14 million) from many, many nations, for the most part drawn from the third millennium CE.
• The conclusion is stark: unhappiness and related measures tend to peak for people in their late 40s or so, mirroring pretty closely the results for happiness measures.
• There are a host of analytical issues involving, for instance, the precise measure of reported “unhappiness” and the selection of control variables for regression analysis. Nonetheless, the main finding of a peak of unhappiness in midlife is quite robust to how these issues are handled, even across countries.
• The impact of some life events is symmetric with happiness and unhappiness: unemployment decreases happiness and raises unhappiness; higher incomes increase happiness and lower unhappiness.
• Oddly(?), being of male gender seems to decrease unhappiness and to decrease happiness.
• There’s a lot of variance in unhappiness between countries. Ireland in 2014 reported a 12.1% rate of adult depression, while in Poland, it was 4.2%. But in both countries, the rate of depression was highest for 55-64 year olds.
• Americans are outliers with respect to the amount of pain reported; in 2018, one-quarter of Americans report having suffered pain on the previous day, and prescription painkiller use is common.
• Suicide rates tend to show a peak in middle-age, but then they eventually begin to rise again at older ages.
• In the US in 2018, almost 10% of people say that their mental health was not good for at least 20 of the past 30 days.
• There’s even a midlife peak in the belief that the country as a whole is getting worse.
• The increase in unhappiness associated with midlife is on a similar scale to what happens with bad events, such as becoming unemployed or losing a spouse.
No comments:
Post a Comment